Retention campaigns#

A retention campaign goal targets users likely to remain in your app at least seven days after installation. With this type of campaign strategy, the Audience Pinpointer feature uses dynamic pricing based on your base bid price and a user’s expected retention rate, allowing you to pay the best price across an entire user base.

To optimize for retention, set a base bid (otherwise known as a CPI, or cost-per-install bid) and a max bid that the Audience Pinpointer can adjust based on the individual user's expected day-seven retention (also known as D7 retention) in your app. You can think of D7 retention as the share of users playing your app on day seven after app installation. Unity determines this percentage after receiving at least one session event from the user within a 24-hour window starting 192 hours after the install event was recorded.

How retention optimization campaigns work#

• A baseline D7 retention in your app for the target audience you have selected might be 10%, which means 10% of users are playing your app on day seven after installing the app.

  • Potential User 1 predicted D7 retention for your app might be 20%, or twice the average. Therefore, the bid for User 1 is your base bid x2.
  • Potential User 2 predicted D7 retention for your app might be 5%, or half the average. Therefore, the bid for User 2 is base bid x0.5.

A retention campaign goal enables you to pay the best price for users based on the predicted retention behavior. Our Audience Pinpointer algorithm ensures you are not overbidding for users who are likely to not play your app after installation, and that you bid the best price for users who are likely to continue using your app at least seven days after installation.

Best practices for configuring retention campaigns#

• The bidding algorithm uses a base and maximum bid amount to dynamically set your bid for each user based on their predicted retention. While the CPI bid for an individual user may be higher or lower than the base CPI bid, it never exceeds the maximum bid.
• Note that the maximum (max) CPI bid is the intended upper limit for what you wish to pay for users depending on their expected retention in your app. It is a good practice to set the max bid at two to three times beyond the base bid.
• Allow at least a full week or two using the provided guidelines to let the data mature before adjusting the target up or down based on campaign performance.
• You can edit these values individually, or check multiple geos to execute bulk changes (increase or decrease by value, increase or decrease by percent, or set to a value).